Wii U Now Supports Full Havok Development Suite

If you're a big or small developer looking to get in on the Wii U development platform to make some games for Nintendo's latest console, there's some additional good news for you: The Wii U now fully supports the entire Havok development suite. This means that developers can make some truly destructive games for the Wii U, taking full advantage of the physics-based development platform for Nintendo's latest console.

Brian Waddle, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Havok commented about the collaboration with the Big 'N', saying..

“We have shared a long-term partnership with Nintendo and are pleased to offer licensing of our entire product suite for Wii U developers worldwide,”.... “With several great Havok-powered launch titles recently released, we are pleased to see Wii U developers pushing the hardware with Havok’s tech. We look forward to seeing Havok Vision Engine power some great high-fidelity games on the new platform.”

The entire suite of tools available to developers taking to the Wii U includes the Havok Cloth for clothes simulation and procedural movement of fabrics and armor, similar to things like in Heavenly Sword or Max Payne 3. Havok Script which can overlay with Lua, making it easy and convenient to setup an environment for artists to make changes using the simple Lua scripting. Havok Vision for high-end rendering will also be supported, along with Havok Animation, Behavior AI, and most importantly Havok Destruction.

For those who don't know, Havok really got their teeth into the industry with the Destruction proponents. Being able to deconstruct the environment in real time with unscripted, undefined results helped usher in a new way for players to make use of physics-based gameplay.

Added to this, many of the aforementioned tools have been used in AAA titles like Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, Torchlight II, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Assassin's Creed III and Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, just to name a few of the titles and the possibilities that could be present for upcoming Wii U games.

Free binary codes are already available to developers signed on to design games for Nintendo's hardware, and now licenses are being made available for the aforementioned tools in the Havok middleware pipeline.

Gaming enthusiasts have got to be excited about this news as it gives Nintendo's Wii U a lot of legs to stand on for software future-proofing, given that the Wii lacked a lot of middleware support that hurt it in the long run, but this is not going to be an issue for the Wii U, which has a ton of support right out of the gate.

Now all we need is Epic to confirm Unreal Engine 4 support for Wii U and you can count the Wii U as an official contender in the next-gen race against the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720.